Knowledge as Power and Resistance

Sor Juana's hunger for knowledge was both personal and political. Corrupt regimes control what people know, limiting access to education, hiding documents, and monopolizing expertise. Knowledge itself becomes a form of power unavailable to most. Sor Juana asserted that women, enslaved and marginalized peoples, and the poor deserve intellectual access. Modern anticorruption strategy includes transparency initiatives (open data, public records), educational access (literacy, critical thinking skills, civic education), and decentralized information systems that resist monopoly control. When more people understand how systems work, can analyze evidence, and access information, corruption becomes visible and harder to execute. Sor Juana's intellectual life was a democratic act: claiming that wisdom and learning are not privileges of the powerful but rights of all. Building knowledge infrastructure is therefore not incidental to anticorruption; it is foundational.